Debarati Sen, “Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling” (SUNY Press, 2017)

In her new book, Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling (SUNY Press, 2017), Debarati Sen analyzes the paradoxes and promises of Fair Trade-organic tea production in Darjeeling, India. Based on more than a decade of feminist longitudinal ethnographic research, Sen investigates why independent women small farmers growing tea on their own land experience market-based social justice regimes like Fair Trade differently from women wage laborers in tea plantations. Simultaneously circumspect and hopeful of the extent and kind of empowerment Fair Trade can bring about, women workers nonetheless use sustainable development as a space to mobilize for more favorable intra-household relations, collective bargaining and access to resources. Everyday Sustainability received the Global Development Studies Book Award from the International Studies Association in 2018.

Sen is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Conflict Management at the School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding and Development in Kennesaw State University.

Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here.

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